its patterns from everything around us, in an interdependent network. We learn to work as nature does, with the material of ourselves: our body, our mind, our companions, and the radical possibilities of the present moment.
In my twenties I met another young American, a Zen Buddhist priest. He spoke of doing zazen — sitting meditation — as practice. The word practice is consistently used to describe meditative activity; I had heard and read it many times before, but that day, for some reason, it hit me between the eyes. I am a musician, I thought, and now I know what practice is. Music, dance, sports, medicine, sitting still on a cushion in a state of concentrated awareness: all are forms of practice, skilled disciplines of doing and being what you are rather than some preparatory work to get to a goal. So began for me a lifelong exploration of the Buddha dharma, the Tao, and other traditions East and West that link up to artistic practice. And with a Buddhist perspective, I began to link improvising with the other imps: impermanence and imperfection. I learned to relish these essential qualities of life and art. And above all, I came to see art-making not as a matter of displaying skill but of awakening and realizing altruistic intentions.
When I was even younger, I was sure I was going to be a biologist. Then a psychologist. I was fascinated by living organisms: bodies, minds, social relations, play. The first article I ever published was in the Journal of Protozoology. I was enthralled by how a single cell can perform all of life’s essential activities, sustain itself in an environment, swim, hunt, interact with others. That protean quality of life is still what guides me as an artist: creating music without dividing into separate functions of composer and performer, doing intermedia art forms such as visual music that speak to several senses at once.
Teachers in universities, conservatories, and high schools regard improvising as a fresh, mysterious item that should be included in the curriculum, if only they can figure out how to do it, earnestly trying to catch up with their students. But it is not an item in a list of skills we might check off in a syllabus. It is not a style or form, not a department or specialty. Improvising is life itself.
What I offer in the following chapters, from different angles and aspects, laced with journeys into music, art, science, politics, business, philosophy, pottery — are glimpses into moments of human contact. These glimpses may take place in the relatively safe and tame environment of a classroom, but later we will meet Herbert Zipper, who was able to cultivate them in the living hell of a Nazi concentration camp. We’ll visit John Cage’s living room, where we will discuss the merits of noisy refrigerators and discover the resonance between mushrooms and music. We’ll learn what we can from frogs. We’ll meet an experimental musician who becomes mayor of a small town and changes it for the better. We’ll unearth the connection between Clint Eastwood’s hat and Japanese folk pottery. And we’ll see how an old koan about a priestess who defends herself from assault with a slip of paper she manifests into a sword speaks to our duty as artists and free human beings.
Throughout these diverse settings, similar themes and lessons crop up and repeat. Improvising cannot be understood as merely a musical or theatrical technique. It must be examined from multiple perspectives, turned over again and again, to reveal their commonality. We examine many types of moments because the crucial lesson of this book is that artistic power is available to anyone, at any moment. It is not a psychological tool, or an artistic tool. It is a way of being.
This book is about what happens in the moments and spaces between people when we create together. Music, movement, image, words are experienced as physiological, as unforced as breathing or the circulation of blood. Such experience is possible not only in the arts but in medicine, in teaching, in civic engagement — anywhere we like. This intimacy doesn’t happen all the time; it comes to an end, and mundane pursuits take over. But when it happens, it is a form of magic and bliss. We co-create something that arises out of listening and mutual attentiveness. We discover that the nervous system is bigger than the brain, bigger than the body.
The most ordinary act of creativity is spontaneous conversation — the art of listening and responding, interacting, taking in environmental factors unconsciously but with precision, modifying what we do as a result of what we see and hear, touch and make, a multidimensional feedback. In our daily lives we create and recognize connections all the time. We don’t need extraordinary credentials. There is nothing special about it, but from that nothing arises our opportunity to attain some wisdom and compassion about the world in which we live. And so we can take art off the pedestal and put it where it belongs, in the dynamic center of our lives.
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I am interested in what happens to people whofind the whole of life so rewarding that they areable to move through it with the same kind ofdelight in which a child moves through a game.
— Margaret Mead
An improvisation by a small group of musicians is a microcosm of evolution. It grows from seemingly nothing, from what appear to be random elements of the environment, and self-organizes into a distinctive event with its own shape, with feeling and relevance. A leaderless ensemble cooperates, exchanging signals of give-and-take, stimulus and response, mutual respect and playfulness. No one is giving directions, yet people find a way to come together in a clear and compelling pattern of action. Paying exquisite attention to each other, they find form and refine its development. They invent a language and culture from the ground up.
As I work with groups in this ancient art, no matter how often I have seen it, I continue to be stunned by how easy it is, and how high the quality of the result. The music composes itself. Sound and movement, gesture and word, story and color, pattern and structure emerge through the ordinary means of communication and feedback at which we are all unconsciously adept.
In a workshop in Canada, four young drama students perform a brief piece, surrounded by twenty-five others in a circle of support. The quartet plays together in vocal sounding and movement. Bodies interweave through space as dynamic sculpture. Nothing is discussed beforehand, but a long conversation ensues afterward. The students discuss the imagery that came up, their communication with each other, how they spontaneously partnered in developing metaphor and complete expression of body and mind in the confines of this big, open studio. One person says he imagined the performers’ bodies as earth and water, feeling the piece connected them not only to those of us in the room but also to nature as seen out the big windows and beyond, to the news of war and political insanity, of which they were acutely aware. From there they discuss their interdependence within the studio as a way into the interdependence of all human beings with each other and with our natural and social environment, cutting through racial, national, professional, and age barriers. The discussion, which began as an exchange of observations about what happened in the piece, has jumped to issues of global survival. I stand in amazement watching this conversation evolve. Another participant says, “Out of animosity comes collaboration.” In the play-space of that room, they are modeling something foundational for the world.
Don’t let anyone tell you the arts are just a frill — some sideshow to the main events of life.
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I drive through the intersection of two busy freeways, connected by a weave lane — a single lane on the right-hand side for both incoming and exiting traffic.
